stuff
A nifty teaser poster for Hitman, starring Timothy Olyphant and Dougray Scott. French director Xavier Gens helms the video game adaptation. [imdb]
First official picture from Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, showing Johnny Depp as the murderous barber with Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett. [imdb]
Official site (with trailer) for Music Within, a movie based on a true story. Richard Pimentel (Ron Livingston), a brilliant public speaker with a troubled past, returns from Vietnam severely hearing-impaired and finds a new purpose in his landmark efforts on the behalf of Americans with disabilities. Melissa George, Michael Sheen, Yul Vazquez, Rebecca DeMornay and Hector Elizondo also star. [imdb]
Heroes season two preview on YouTube (also at IESB)!
IESB's exclusive video interview with Neil Marshall, director of Dog Soldiers, The Descent, and the upcoming Doomsday.
Russell Crowe is top of the studio's wish list to play the villain in J. J. Abram's Star Trek movie. (Moviehole) [imdb]
An insider on the set of Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight talks a little about Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker. (IndieWIRE Blogs)
Sarah Weinman has collected all the video links forming Tom Snyder's 1981 in-prison interview with cult leader Charles Manson. Amazing stuff.
Moviehole interviews Matthew Weiner, creator of my new favourite show, Mad Men. [official site]
Jeff Dorchen (PopMatters) on American psyches and American cars:
"So, yes, matter is innocent; it’s people with their intangible motives and inner conflicts that corrupt matter. This is not to say that a muscle car as an extension of the body is not problematic, especially, for example, in the context of global warming. As the mind extends itself through the brain and body into the car, it creates what the world calls an American. America is big and powerful, made up of big and powerful individuals, so American body-extensions have to be big and powerful, too. No one wants sleek, silent, energy-efficient genitals, to extend the analogy, if you will - if you can afford them, you want big, roaring, turbo-powered genitals."
If you're interested in the subject of car cultures, Daniel Miller edited a good book on it.
Christopher Hitchens (New York Times) takes a look at "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows":
"For some time now the novels have been attempting a kind of secular dramatization of the battle between good and evil. The Ministry of Magic (one of Rowling’s better inventions) has been seeking to impose a version of the Nuremberg Laws on England, classifying its subjects according to blood and maintaining its own Gestapo as well as its own Azkaban gulag. But again, over time and over many, many pages this scenario fails to chill..."
Edited: so_spiffed is up on all the links re. the whole row that's started between Angus & Robertson and its independent suppliers, including commentary and a response from A&R. (Here, again, is the article that started the whole thing.) Teresa at Making Light has my favourite comment:Wouldn’t life be interesting if we could just tell our trading partners that we’ve decided to raise our “minimum threshold of profitability” on past transactions, and they owe us?